Aliana
We separated from the crowd and walked down the path, gravel crunching beneath our feet, the sound of music and laughter fading behind us with each step. Rev, Talon, Jax, and Gian followed at a respectful distance, their presence a quiet wall of muscle rather than an intrusion.
“What will you do with them?” I murmured.
“Nothing that you need to worry about,” Sorin said, rubbing slow circles against my lower back, the same gesture he’d repeated all night, grounding and familiar.
We approached the cells, and the hinges groaned in protest as an officer pushed the door open for us, the sound echoing down a corridor that smelled of damp stone and something colder underneath.
I didn’t want to see any of them. But I needed the closure, and there was a strange, deliberate justice in seeking it tonight—the night that celebrated me and my mate, the night that had crowned everything they’d tried to prevent.
The scent of desperation still clung to this outbuilding, thick and stale, clinging to the walls like old smoke. Sorin made no apologies for it. This was the cost of working against the Bloodborne pack, and he’d never once pretended otherwise.
We paused outside a solitary confinement cell. It was strange to think I’d once found peace in a space just like this one—silence, stillness, no one demanding anything of me. A different life. A different woman.
The key turned. The metal door groaned open.
I covered my mouth with my hand.
All three of them had lost weight, their bodies shrunken in on themselves.
The perfect clothing that never held a wrinkle, the carefully styled hair, the facial treatments Deeana had once been so vain about—all of it gone.
Replaced with hollow cheeks, filthy skin, and eyes sunken so deep they looked bruised.
Gone, just like my father’s hand and foot.
I stared at Deeana’s hands—the same hands that had slipped poison into a ceremonial goblet, the same hands that had once struck me for leaving a rug unswept.
“What did I ever do to you?” I asked, and I was proud, distantly, that my voice never faltered.
Her eyes flicked past me to Sorin before returning to mine, calculating even now.
“Cora should have had everything,” she said, looking me up and down with the same sneer she’d worn every day of my childhood. “Not you.”
I glanced at my father. He sat slumped against the wall, as good as deaf, mute, and blind, as he’d always been where I was concerned—present, but never truly seeing me. Cora shifted where she crouched in the corner.
Her eyes crawled up the length of my dress, lingering on the crown atop my head.
“She should have died, Mother. You couldn’t even get that right,” she growled, voice cracked and ragged from disuse.
Her anger made her careless. She lunged, trying to shift, and the collar around her throat activated instantly—a flash of light, a sharp electric snap—and she went down hard.
Her wolf retreated before it could fully surface, and she lay twitching on the filthy floor, spit gathering at the corner of her mouth.
I thought I would feel something like triumph, watching them like this.
But it was all so small. So baseless. So sad.
“Come,” Sorin said, his hand finding mine, guiding me gently out of the cell and back into air that didn’t taste like rot.
As soon as we stepped outside, I inhaled the evening air, letting it fill my lungs and chase away the last traces of that suffocating cell. Alpha Grayson had vanished, and so would my family. There would be no threat to our pups. Ever.
The visiting packs had all left, their convoys long gone, but the Bloodborne pack carried on without them—music still drifting from the garden, laughter rising and falling in easy waves, the warm glow of lanterns visible even from here.
I could hear the frivolity, distant and golden, and it made me smile despite everything I’d just seen.
I placed a hand over my belly, feeling the quiet, steady warmth beneath my palm.
It was time to look forward. Time to rebuild.